A machine type communication (MTC, Machine-Type Communication) application refers to network communications performed by one network element or between multiple network elements without human involvement, that is, a machine to machine (M2M, Machine To Machine) application, such as applications for traffic control and management, factory monitoring, and remote metering. In an M2M application, multiple machine to machine equipment (M2ME, Machine To Machine Equipment) having same M2M application functions form a unit, which is referred to as a group (Group) for short.
In embodiments of the present invention, a user equipment involved in an MTC application is referred to as an MTC device, which may also be referred to as an MTC user, an M2M user, or an M2M device etc. This type of MTC devices are devices of which physical layers, access Stratum, and non-access Stratum are specially simplified for an MTC application. The characteristics of this type of MTC devices include: the interaction traffic of every MTC device may be very small and the interaction may burst; the location of an MTC device may be relatively fixed or seldom changed; and an MTC device implements relatively simple function, where only specific information transmission and interaction needs to be completed; and behavior of the MTC devices under a specific application is consistent. For example, in a smart metering service, all MTC devices upload data to a specific server at specific time.
In an M2M application, there are a large number of MTC devices. Massive MTC devices, if they access a network and compete for network resources, bring a new burden to the existing network, especially in some application scenarios such as a smart metering service. In many countries, a smart grid requires a large number of MTC devices upload metering data frequently at an interval of 5 minutes, and the size of the metering data is relatively small. A large number of MTC devices need to periodically and frequently initiate uplink data transmission, the data size is small, and the sending occasion is relatively fixed, which result in a serious burden on the network.
In the prior art, in order to prevent massive MTC devices from simultaneously accessing a network and causing a serious burden on the network, a solution for grouping on the application layer is proposed. That is, MTC devices are grouped on the application layer according to users' quality of service (QoS, Quality of Service) requirements, uploading destination addresses, or location information, and the like, and the number of MTC devices simultaneously accessing the network is controlled by using group paging, thereby avoiding the cases of massive MTC devices accessing the network simultaneously.
However, the application layer cannot obtain information about a cell in which an MTC device camped; therefore, the grouping on the application layer cannot ensure that users in different cells are balanced.
Therefore, the existing grouping solution based on the application layer cannot ensure that users in different cells are balanced, and the circumstance of concurrent accessing by users in a cell still persists.